Mixed Media, 2021
Cheak Yen Hui
Memories promised by family photographs are characterized by held off closure – happy beginnings, happy middles and no endings to all family stories…
The promises point toward the future: what our memories, our stories will be… They will be shared and they will be happy –
the tone of seduction is quite imperious… we will make our memories, capture all those moments we will someday want to treasure, call to mind, tell stories about.The promise is of a brighter future… nostalgia-in-prospect, always hooks into, seeks to produce, desires hinging on a particular kind of story – a family story with its own forms of plenitude…
Annette Kuhn, “She will always be your little girl” in Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination (London: Verso, 2002), p. 23
Collection of In(significants) relooks at personal and collective memory – encounters with nature, a favourite rock, a favourite shirt, a childhood toy, a mother’s shirt – how physical objects and images provide a tangible basis that grounds us amidst life’s fleeting and subjective experiences and memories. A ‘re-surfacing’, re-looking and re-encountering with intentional white voids or spaces, for a re-consideration, re-visitation and ‘re-remembrance’ of events, people, places or spaces.
Read my interview here.
I am interested in subjects of memory, remembering, remembrance and the remembered particularly in the use of objects and image as artefact in my practice – with an interest in their potential as an evoker of memories, silent witness, and record of past experiences that can be both personal and shared.
As such my practice explores ideas of the uncanny and relational aspects of these objects and images; leveraging on their objective and subjective duality in my work, with a reminder of their transient and fleeting origins through the materiality of the made objects while considering the selection, curation and fragmentation involved with memory, memorialisation , image collection and recollection.
Read more about a x edge 2020 and the existing artworks.
aedge 